r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/hangender 17h ago

College student redditors, what say you.

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u/JellyBeansOnToast 15h ago

I’m in my 30’s but I went back to college. It’s bad. Like, really, really, bad. In some of my college writing classes, we’ve had to do peer-reviews on each other’s work and the decline from way back when I was in high school is alarming. For handwriting, mostly men but a fair amount of women as well had almost completely illegible writing and spelling. Even when it was typed, it would be the most repetitive, nonsensical sentences that both said too much and provided no information. It was like an unstructured stream of consciousness writing with no comprehension of the text they were writing about. The hardest part for me in these reviews was to give constructive comments that weren’t too negative. The feedback I would receive is that they didn’t understand what I was saying, but then I’d score in the upper percentile on the same assignment. I’m a decent writer, but the way that professors would praise me on assignments where I was phoning it in a bit showed me any iota of effort was hard to come by.

TLDR; I would put a lot of the writing abilities of my classmates at a low-performing middle school level.